Problem/Question regarding multiple partitions

[audiyoda]

Can't quite figure this one out -- My wife's got a 1 year old Sony VAIO laptop (FX215). It's got WinME loaded on the C: partition (4 Gig) and a seperate D: partition for programs and such. Well, my wife's not done a real good job installing programs to the D: partition -- actually, there's nothing on it. But her C: partition is almost completely loaded. She'd much rather have just one HDD rather than a partitioned drive. So I loaded Partition Magic 6 and tried to delete the D: partition and re-allocate the C: partition to fill the entire drive -- PM 6 had an error. So I paid for the upgrade to PM 7 -- same error. So I tried f-disk, just deleted the D: partition and allow PM 7 to extend the primary partition to fit the entire HDD -- again, program error. So we figured we'd just re-format -- so I formatted the entire drive, put the Sony recovery disk with WinME on it and re-loaded Windows. What does the recovery disk do -- create two partitions. ARGHHH!!!!

According to the PM 7 FAQ and error codes, this has something to do with Sony's proprietary setup. I'm not a f-disk pro but is there someway to use f-disk to delete the D: partition and then make the primary partition larger? Or am I stuck buying XP home and stating from scratch?

-Craig

[reboot]

There's one way around it. Fdisk the drive the way you want it, load a generic Windows, then grab all the drivers from the recovery disks. It's a big job to find all the Sony specific crap on their CD, but it's the only way you can get to use the full drive, and still have all the proprietary stuff working.

[audiyoda]

Why did I know you would say that?

I suppose I should have taken them up on their XP upgrade offer when I had the chance.

-Craig